Some caucasian women and her driver got kidnapped from within Kandahar city three weeks ago, and our plan was scrapped, and the team took the training to Paktia province instead, and I stayed back.
This morning, at a dog fight competition, a bomb exploded, killing dozens of people. As I see this, I think everyone was right to prevent me from going there.
But my fear is that I'm trading in valuable life experiences for the feeling of being safe.
And this makes me afraid of how I'll turn out in the end because I took the roads frequently taken, because of non-existent land mines.
One of my favorite articles on liberty and security was a Shell-Economist prize winning article by someone which said the following:
Blowing threats out of proportion is, of course, the stock trade of TV news, whether the menace in question is a summer rainstorm or the distressing stains revealed when an investigative reporter shines ultraviolet light on a freshly laundered bed sheet at an upscale hotel. But television reflects its viewers' attitudes as well as shaping them, and clearly there exists a very large audience receptive to the never-ending theme: Life is meant, ever and always, to be safe--and you're not safe!
Enter Osama bin Laden.
Twelve hours hadn't passed since the first airliner struck the World Trade Center on September 11 before the talking heads on CNN turned their attention to the subject of how much freedom Americans would be willing to give up in order to feel more secure. I evidently missed the explanation of how they came to see this as the first and most obvious question written in the flames still rising from the rubble in lower Manhattan. As suddenly as the planes that had slammed into the twin towers that morning, the issue simply materialized in the vestments of the story's anointed spin.
At the time it seemed bizarre. I had spent most of the day watching the footage of those same flames, and not once had it occurred to me that a logical response to the horror might be to sacrifice my freedom.
Sure enough, though, the newsies had it right. It was as if the USA Patriot Act signed into law by President Bush six weeks later (and denounced by the Civil Liberties Union as "based on the faulty assumption that safety must come at the expense of civil liberties") were already drafted and ready on the morning of September 11, awaiting only one final push from the lobbyists at al Qaeda.
In retrospect, it's hardly startling that the pundits--and the Congress--pounced so quickly on the idea of trading freedom for safety. Nor should it come as any surprise that the American public (80 percent of it, according to this summer's opinion polls) would so readily accept the exchange as a sensible one, even when the freedoms to be surrendered are unspecified and the explanations of why eliminating them will guarantee anyone's security are not forthcoming. The TV weather people have us pegged. What Americans demand above all from their government, from their weather--from life itself--is that they be made to feel safe.
The article concludes with a favorite statement of mine:
Safety is a fine thing, but as an obsession it rots the soul. If I should live to be ninety, and I am called upon to attest to the other nursing-home residents that my life was about something racier than guessing right on the butter vs. margarine conundrum, I will speak of that thunderstorm on Lake Superior. I'll describe the touch-and-go struggle to keep the boat pointed just enough off the wind to maintain headway, and the jackhammer pounding of a madly luffing mainsail trying to spill a 75-knot gale. I'll talk about the way we huddled in the cockpit with our eyes rigidly forward because looking aft would mean another lightning-illuminated glimpse of the dinghy we towed, risen completely out of the water and twirling like a propeller on the end of its line.
Pleasant though many of them were, with the cheese and crackers and such, I doubt I'll have much to say about the hours I spent on Superior with the sails furled, motoring in perfect safety through flat water and dead air.
